'And the other. . body?' I asked, hoping against hope that it had somehow changed from what had been unearthed alongside Thorkel's corpse.
'Still a woman, Trader,' grunted Finnlaith and we all turned to stare at the cloth-wrapped bundle, stiff with cold, that we had brought back from where Thorkel had killed it. Her. For a dizzying moment I heard her scream, saw the whirl of snow and the mad-mouthed frenzy of Thorkel, howling his hate and his blade on her before he died.
'Oior-pata,' Tien had whispered when Ospak had cleared the snow from the woman's face. The little Bulgar had hunched into himself after that and would say nothing more. It was Avraham, the big red-haired Khazar, who had finally told us it was an old Skythian word meaning 'man-haters'.
She was hacked bloody by Thorkel's mad rage, but enough was there to see the fine decorated clothing, the tattoos on her face made stark with her blood-drained pallor, the marks of old scars blue white on her cheeks, the hair gathered in braids and tied back, the way a fighting man does.
Young, too — but no thrall, nor a maid you would want to flirt with, as Jon Asanes pointed out when he and Silfra loaded her on the cart. She had a single boar's tooth on a leather loop round her neck and I did not doubt that she had killed it herself. Her palms, at the base of the frozen fingers, were callous hard and her thumbs muscled and ridged with hard flesh, the draw-ring still fitted to one.
'Sword and steppe bow,' Finn pointed out. 'She is bowlegged, too — see. She spent more years on a horse than on her feet and those hands did not get like that making soup or skelping bairns.'
But it was her head that bothered us all. Strange, stretched, sloping, it only accentuated the deep scars on either cheeks, too straight to be accidental. Men made signs against the evil eye; whispers of Nifelheim rose up like fumes from a swamp.
'Dwarves?' scoffed Gyrth. 'Underground smiths? When did they become spear-headed women from the Great White who ride and fight like men?'
It was Jon Asanes who knew it, even as the big Khazar, Avraham, muttered on and on about the Jewish sacred writings forbidding dealings with such unclean spirits.
'Herodotus,' Jon said, bright with the light that had sparked up in his head.
'Who?' growled Finn, trying to back the spare horse they had brought into the shafts of the cart, now turned back upright.
'A Greek. He wrote of women like these back in the old days of Greek heroes. Amazonoi they were called — warrior women of the Skyth tribes. Herakles, the strongest man in the world, fought them once, long ago. I read it in a book in the monastery in Novgorod.'
The fact that he had seen a book and even read it impressed most to silence for a moment and they stared, seeing the Greek youth in a new light.
'They live still,' said Morut, the small, dark Khazar. 'They are part of one of the tribes of the Yass. .'
'There is cherem on even the mention of this,' thundered Avraham but Morut, though he flushed a little, merely shrugged.
'No matter of mine, cherem,' he said and Avraham stormed angrily off.
'What is this cherem?' Gyrth asked.
'A sort of decree,' Morut answered, 'that says you are no longer a follower of the Torah.'
The Torah was their name for their sacred sagas. Breaking such a decree would mean Morut was no longer a Jew and I had met enough of such people — Khazars and Rhadanites both — in Birka to know that was the worst of punishments for them.
The dark little Khazar shrugged again. 'I am a trapper and a hunter,' he said. 'Avraham is of the warrior caste, so he must be a Jew and embraced it properly, even to getting his foreskin cut as a boy. I did also — but now half my family are in the south and have probably become Mussulmen. I may go there too, so may become one myself, though it means forsaking green wine and ale, which is a hard thing.'
Finn ranted and argued firmly on the foolishness of a religion which stopped you drinking, not to mention one which put a blade anywhere near your pizzle. I was storing away the knowledge that not all Khazars were Jews. Warriors and other high born were, but I found out later not even all of them. There were Khazars in the guard hird of the Great City who were baptized Christ-men.
More importantly, here was the strangeness I had come across before and was bewildered by. How could you put on and remove a belief in the gods, as if it were no more than a clean cloak?
Back in the village, I had more to worry about than that. After my head had been looked at, I met with Vladimir, Sigurd and Dobrynya in a quiet place, where we were joined by Crowbone. He and Vladimir went off into one corner, the latter clear in his delight that Olaf was safe.
'Bone, blood and steel,' I offered dryly as the other two offered their congratulations on my safe return. 'That old oath of ours even brought my sword out, too.'
Sigurd stiffened, for he knew I implied that he had only come after Crowbone, while Vladimir worried only about the sabre and how I could read a path from it to 'his' treasure. Only the Oathsworn had come after me alone, driven by the oath and the unveiling of that fact still left me dazed and shivering at the power in it — a power I had scorned and kicked against almost all my life, it seemed.
Crowbone, on the other hand, smiled a knowing twist on to his face.
'Right enough,' he said flatly, which could have meant anything, but Sigurd looked as if he would argue the point, then swallowed, admitting it even as the truth made him avoid my eyes.
Then Vladimir clasped Crowbone by both wrists and they stared into each other's faces, like long-lost brothers and I felt a doubt about Vladimir wanting only the silver secret and the sword that guided me.
I wondered, with a sudden sick lurch, if that boy was working some subtle seidr on the young prince. Even as I said the words: 'He is only nine' to myself, I could not rid myself of the suspicion. And now I owed him my life.
'They were almost too late,' Dobrynya went on in his bass rumble. 'Tien says the buran came on more fierce and swift than any he has ever seen.'
The buran, I had found out, was the name for these winter ice storms. Kvasir said that the rescue party had only survived it because Tien had insisted they pack his yurt, those little round steppe huts which seemed just a puzzle of saplings and acres offelt. Finn agreed, saying admiringly that the yurt was as stout as an Iceland steading.
'Not just the buran was a danger,' growled Sigurd.
'Yes,' I agreed. 'There is the woman.'
Dobrynya tugged his beard into a two-tined fork and scowled. 'Tien says it is likely they were all women, all the ones who attacked. He says they are believers in the old ways, the old Hun ways, including some strange practices that stretch the heads of chosen children.'
We were all silent with wonder and the thrill of disgust over that one, while Vladimir and Crowbone grew loud in their private corner, laughing over Crowbone's account of events. I gave odds on it including nothing about pissing himself.
'These warrior women now belong to the Yass,' Dobrynya went on, 'though that tribe have little control over these women now. The Khazars ruled the Yass tribes and kept these Man-Haters from riding while they were a power, but now that we have broken the Khazars, it seems we have unleashed a horror on to the steppe.'
'Why do they ride?' demanded Sigurd, frowning.
'To stop us,' I said before Dobrynya could speak. I was sure of it, as sure as if someone had skeined the runes of it for me to read. 'To stop us reaching Atil's howe.'